Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: (a) Difficulties in understanding posts due to missing or assumed context, (b) need for standardization of posts (Figure 1  in  M.J. Ferdous et al.). Introduction Social media sites such as Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube play a central role in how people exchange ideas, debate current issues, and build communities, with threaded discussions serving as a key mechanism for interaction across these platforms. These platforms are designed around visual structures: nested replies, indentation, spacing, and visual grouping allow sighted users to quickly scan conversations, identify relationships between posts, and decide where to engage. For blind users who rely on screen readers, accessing these conversations involves a fundamentally different interaction model. As shown in the accompanying video, screen readers present content linearly, reading one element at a time while the user moves through posts and interface elements using keyboard commands such as Tab and Shift+Tab...

Students, professors, industry experts, and others came to Beijing to attend the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) . This was the first time CIKM had accepted a long paper from the Old Dominion University Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (WS-DL) and I was happy to represent us at this prestigious conference. CIKM is different from some of our other conference destinations. CIKM's focus spans all forms of information and knowledge, leading to a high diversity in submission topics. The conference organizers classified CIKM papers into topics including advertising, user modeling, urban systems, knowledge graphs, information retrieval, data mining, natural language processing, machine learning, social media, health care, privacy, and security. There were multiple tracks going in five different rooms across three days. There were 202 long papers, 107 short papers, 38 applied research papers, and 26 demos. ...

The XKCD comic " Study " parodies  the challenges of recruiting study participants. As part of " Social Cards Probably Provide For Better Understanding Of Web Archive Collections " (recently accepted for publication by CIKM2019 ), I had to learn how to conduct user studies. One of the most challenging problems to solve while conducting user studies is recruiting participants. Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MT) solves this problem by providing a marketplace where participants can earn money by completing studies for researchers. This blog post summarizes the lessons I have learned from other studies that have successfully employed MT. I have found parts of this information scattered throughout different bodies of knowledge, but not gathered in one place; thus, I hope it is a useful starting place for future researchers. MT is by far the largest source of study participants, with over 100,000 available participants . MT is an automated system that facilitates ...

Web archive collections provide meaning by sampling specific resources from the web. We want to summarize these resources by sampling mementos from those collections and visualizing them as a social media story. On Tuesday, we released our latest pre-print " Social Cards Probably Provide Better Understanding of Web Archive Collections " ( ACM published version ). My work builds on AlNoamany's work of using social media storytelling to provide a visualization that summarizes web archive collections. In previous blog posts I discussed different storytelling services . A key component of their capability to convey understanding is the surrogate , a small visualization of a web page that provides a summary of that page, like the surrogate within the Twitter Tweet example shown below. However, there are many types of surrogates. We want to use a group of surrogates together as a story to provide a summary of a web archive collection. Which type of surrogate works best fo...